Wine Tasting Party 101

Wine Tasting Party 101

Wine + Friends = Fun!

If you love wine, a wine tasting party is the best excuse to get you friends and family together for a night of fun. It's also the perfect time to share your love of wine with those closest to you and experiment with new varieties of wine that you may never have had the opportunity to try before.

To kick off your wine tasting party arrangements, start by deciding what type of wine tasting party holds the most interest for you. Much like wines themselves, there are different types of parties for whatever occasion suits your mood. Listed below are some of these types of parties and a summary of what each one is.

Different Types of Wine Tasting Parties

Vertical Wine Tasting - this is a tasting in which a single wine is tasted from the same producer over several years. This gives the taster an opportunity to experience how a varietal style can change due to weather patterns or other natural elements affecting grapes from year to year.

Horizontal Wine Tasting - Just the opposite of a vertical wine tasting, a horizontal wine tasting focuses on a wine varietal from a single year, but made by multiple producers.

Old World vs New World - In this tasting party goers compare a wine that was grown in the "Old World" (Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain) with ones grown in the "New World" (North and South America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand)

Wine and Cheese Tasting - Wine and cheese, like peanut butter and jelly or Facebook and birthdays, some things just go better together. When hosting a wine and cheese party, you are able to introduce family and friends, as well as yourself to new pairings you may never have tried previously. Most cheeses, when paired with the right wine, can actually enhance, or seem to change the flavor of a wine.

"Priceless" Tasting - This is a pretty easy, you simply hide the price of the wines that are brought to the party, thus disallowing any sort of taster bias due to its price. Many times people at Priceless Tastings are amazed to find out what they actually like, such as discovering that that a 23 dollar Cab and an 80 dollar cab are startlingly comparable.

What Next?

After you have decided what kind of Wine Tasting Party you're going to have, you'll need to determine who it is you're going to invite.

Next you'll want to make up a tasting card. This card will specify the type of wine, the vineyard it was produced in, the year, and a description of the wine. Each guest should have their own tasting card to make notes on.

That's pretty much all you need to do, so break out the wine glasses , bottle openers , and cheese, and get ready for an evening that's going to be packed with fun.